Across America an electoral giant is stirring. The country's growing Latino population – projected to be almost a third of the US population by 2050 – is changing the demographic face of the nation, with potentially huge political consequences.

Several of the key battleground states that are likely to determine the result of the presidential election on 6 November have large Hispanic populations. In Florida, the quintessential swing state, there are 2.1million eligible Latino voters, one in six of the electorate.

That's comfortably enough to sway the result in a state which Barack Obama won in 2008 by fewer than 250,000 votes over John McCain.

Colorado, another key battleground state this year, has one in eight eligible voters, or 13%, who are Latino. Nevada has 224,000 eligible Hispanic voters, about 100,000 more than the margin by which Obama won the state last time.

Despite the steadily rising strength of the American Latino community, it remains a relatively poorly understood and unrealised electoral force. What motivates Hispanic adults to back one candidate and not the other, or even vote at all?

How are they responding to the increasingly hostile noises coming from the American right about the need to remove undocumented immigrants from the country? In what ways are young Hispanics, who themselves form a growing segment within this growing demographic, making use of their burgeoning power?

To answer some of these questions, the Guardian teamed up with the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. Seven journalism students, directed by USC professors Marc Cooper and Alan Mittelstaedt, collaborated with the Guardian in a project to explore the sleeping giant of the Latino electorate.

With funding help from News21, the journalism education project of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S and James L Knift Foundation, the students fanned out across America to towns and cities selected in tandem with the Guardian. The towns – in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington state – all have one thing in common: an Hispanic population that is approaching or has already surpassed the majority 50% mark rendering these places "majority-minority" arbiters of the future of the US.

The students' dispatches provide a fascinating snapshot of the American Latino population as we approach the November presidential election. The first thing that leaps out of them is the diversity of their communities.

Contrary to the reductive uniformity imposed on Hispanics in much of the political debate, there is vast range depicted here. There are the established communities of San Antonio, Texas, and Pueblo, Colorado, where most of the Latinos have for generations enjoyed full US citizenship; in contrast to the more transient communities in Washington state.

Some of the populations are largely Puerto Rican, as in Poinciana in central Florida; others overwhelmingly of Mexican descent as in Arizona and California. There are the apple- and grape-pickers of Washington state; the mushroom pickers and industrial workers of Pennsylvania; and the (now all-too often unemployed) tourism service workers in Florida.

Such diversity apart, the political lesson that leaps out of so many of the reports is that the sleeping giant of the Latino voter remains just that – sleeping. Turnout at elections remains dismally low. Nationally, fewer than a third of Latino eligible voters cast their ballots in 2010 compared with almost half of whites and 44% of black Americans.

In Poinciana, Florida – a key electoral target in a key electoral state – Puerto Rican turnout is a miserable 17% compared with 80% in their country of origin.

The report from Washington state makes the most depressing reading. In the fruit-picking haven of Yakima Valley in the south of the state, levels of representation for Latinos are reminiscent of the political invisibility that African Americans used to endure in the segregated deep south.

The dispatches point to a regressive pattern of disenfranchisement of American Latinos. Because they tend to vote so anaemically, politicians tend to ignore them as an electoral force that merits wooing; because they are ignored they cannot see the point of turning out to vote.

As Rick Palacio, chairman of Colorado's Democratic party and a sixth-generation Latino Coloradan, puts it: "There is some apathy among eligible voters – people don't quite get the benefits to them of participating in our democracy."

The economic hardship being felt by Hispanic communities more keenly than most American demographic groups merely heightens that circular pattern of disenfranchisement. It is no coincidence that most of our student reporters found themselves on the poorer side of town – amid neighborhoods vacated during the foreclosure crisis in Florida, or in a Pennsylvania rustbelt town where manufacturing has collapsed – because that is where most Hispanics live.

Unemployment and the need for job creation runs through all the dispatches as a primary preoccupation. So too does scepticism that politicians of either party will provide meaningful answers. And so the sleeping giant slumbers on.

And yet, there are signs of stirring. In Arizona, the people of the small town of Guadaulpe found their response – and as a result their political voice – to the heavy-handed police sweeps waged against their community by America's notorious "toughest sheriff" Joe Arpaio.

On the night of one of his raids, the mayor Rebecca Jiminez stood up to Arpaio and told him she didn't want him or his "posse" to come back to the town. He was furious, but never did come back.

In Arizona, such resistance has spilled over into political outcomes. Most symbolically, Russell Pearce, the leader of the Republicans in the state Senate who was the architect of the infamous crackdown on undocumented immigrants, SB 1070, was voted out of office.

Those seeds of change have been noted by politicians on both sides. Obama's re-election campaign opened an office in Pueblo, Colorado, in February, and has been intensely registering and courting Hispanic voters ever since.

Polling data suggests that if Obama puts in the effort and gets his message across, he could persuade Latinos to push aside their doubts and cast their votes. In 2008, he won 67% Latino support and there is evidence that his decision to grant undocumented young Latinos a two-year respite from threat of deportation is having a positive impact.

There are also signs of the Republicans reflecting on their positions. In Santa Ana, California, a new brand of conservatism is emerging from elements of the Republican party. This strategy eschews the tough talk of "attrition through enforcement" and "self-deportation" that has epitomised much of the conservative discourse on immigration including that coming from the mouth of the presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

Instead, the new approach talks about guest worker programmes and providing temporary work permits that would allow undocumented immigrants a way out of illegality.

Whether or not such new thinking continues to develop within both main parties will depend largely on the final theme that emerges strongly from the student dispatches: the question of youth. If the sleeping giant ever wakes up, it will be the young voters who kick it out of bed.

Every year about 600,000 American Latinos, with full voting rights, turn 18. Couple that with the fact that more than a third of the nationwide Hispanic population is under 18, and this transcends into a electoral time bomb.

Will young Latinos sieze the day, or allow apathy to continue to dissipate their power? The seven dispatches presented here from the changing face of America provide a few clues to that increasingly urgent question.